The most difficult aspect of Rachel Lears’s documentary Knock Down the House is that it doesn’t end in victory—at least not for everyone. Then-candidate and now-Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a singularly charismatic politician whose defeat of establishment Democrat incumbent Joe Crowley made national headlines, did indeed upend the New York Democratic machine, sending Fox News into a desperate tailspin. But Lears’s movie also follows three other candidates: St. Louis nurse Cori Bush, anti-fracking West Virginian Paula Jean Swearengin, and health-care activist Amy Vilela. All four women ran for political office during a year in which more women ran than ever; all four pledged that they would not accept campaign donations from corporate PACs. Except for Ocasio-Cortez, all lost.

Knock Down the House strains, sometimes, with the tension of the contrast it represents. On the one hand is behind-the-scenes footage of how a remarkably telegenic millennial candidate primaried out Crowley, a well-connected Democrat who appeared to have his sights on Nancy Pelosi’s job as the Speaker of the House. On the other is how devastatingly—and, sometimes despairingly—far the other candidates landed from their goals.

Thanks to the extra footage provided by her victory—and Lears’s home base in New York City—Ocasio-Cortez’s story ends up becoming the primary arc of the documentary. The candidate radiates authenticity on-camera, laughing and crying and shoveling ice into buckets for her bartending job. She’s often righteously indignant, but she smiles constantly—juggling both her firmly held beliefs and requisite glad-handing with grace.

In one of the film’s most galvanizing moments, Ocasio-Cortez shows up to a debate in Parkchester, but Crowley sends a pinch hitter—former councilwoman Annabel Palma, who is supposed to argue on his behalf. Ocasio-Cortez—a petite, loud woman—wipes the floor with her opponent, turning Crowley’s absence into the only talking point of the debate. In a later scene, Ocasio-Cortez takes on Crowley himself in a televised debate on local news. She’s surrounded by reams of paper and wielding a highlighter, studying talking points like she’s cramming for a test. She pauses to reel off affirmations: “I can do this. I am experienced enough to do this. I am knowledgeable enough to do this. I am prepared enough to do this. I am mature enough to do this. I am brave enough to do this. And this whole thing, this whole time, he’s going to tell me I can’t do this. He’s going to tell me that I’m small, that I’m little, that I’m young, that I’m inexperienced.”

She raises both her arms, and with an exhale and a nervous grin, pushes into the air in front of her. Her victory, when it comes, brings with it a fist-pumping joy.

Cori Bush in Knock Down the House.

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Ocasio-Cortez has star quality—but not all of the other candidates in Knock Down the House do. In West Virginia, Swearengin leads the camera crew to a practically leveled mountain, the collateral damage of fracking. She points to houses in her neighborhood where residents have cancer. She believes it’s due to the poisonous by-products of the controversial mining technique, which include water laced with chemicals and metals. Meanwhile, her opponent, Senator Joe Manchin, takes campaign contributions from the energy and coal industries. Swearengin’s rage animates her in stump speeches and while canvassing; fury seems to emanate from her, even through the screen. And while she significantly outperforms her polling numbers, she ultimately loses to Manchin by nearly 40 points.

In Nevada, Vilela visits her daughter’s grave, then straps the urn of her ashes into the backseat—because, she says, Shalynne didn’t like to be tied down. In a later scene, she breaks down in tears, describing how her 22-year-old, uninsured daughter died after being turned away from an emergency room. Vilela ran on single-payer health care; her opponent, Steven Horsford, focused on the much smaller goal of reducing the cost of prescription medication. Horsford won about 62 percent of the vote. Vilela, in third place, wooed just over 9 percent.

The documentary doesn’t quite know what to make of these failures, except to show them to us. It doesn’t feel like enough, perhaps because of the shocking injustices that Lears locates with her camera—the environmental degradation and police violence, absentee governance, and rapacious health-care system. Knock Down the House would have made an easier—and, arguably, better—story if it had focused solely on Ocasio-Cortez. At the same time, diminishing either the other candidates trying to make a difference or the obstacles that Ocasio-Cortez was up against in her own campaign would have been a disservice to the story it tells.

As a result, like so much else in 2019, Knock Down the House is bittersweet. It brings the idealism and vision of these candidates up against the hard rules of an entrenched system, and then it just sits there—observing, but not commenting on why one of these candidates succeeded when the others did not. Its stance raises the question of what viewers are expected to take away from the film. Is it meant for a partisan audience? To convince the viewer to run for office? For mega-fans of Ocasio-Cortez? (That last one's me.)

Lears’s documentary does not invoke Donald Trump or the 2016 election, which would have been a convenient but polarizing organizing principle. It also avoids digging into the two PACs that supported and advised these candidates: Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. (Lears found the candidates in the documentary through the PACs.) Knock Down the House appears meant for people who agree with its candidates already, which makes its narrow lens feel a bit withholding of the larger issues at play in this—how can I put it?—supremely fucked-up political landscape.

But perhaps I’m selling it short. After all, what animates the whole film is just how much these women are willing to work, sweat, and fight for what they believe in—with a single-minded dedication that has them panicked, exhausted, and outnumbered. Lears’s lens captures not just the candidates, but the volunteers—scrappy, seasoned canvassers and callers, smoking cigarettes in Nevada or crowding on porches in West Virginia. This is the process. Not all of these candidates win. But all of them try, holding on to the belief as Ocasio-Cortez learned from her dad, the first time she visited Washington, D.C., and gazed upon the monuments to American greatness: “This all belongs to us.”